Bosnian Serbs convicted in genocide cases

Jun. 11, 2010 12:00 AMAssociated Press

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Two Bosnian Serbs were convicted of genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment Thursday for the 1995 massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica - the harshest judgment ever delivered by the U.N. war-crimes tribunal on the Balkan wars.

A third Bosnian Serb officer was given a 35-year prison sentence for aiding and abetting genocide. Two others were acquitted of genocide charges but convicted of extermination, murder and persecution, while a final two officers were found guilty of lesser charges of war crimes. Sentences for those four ranged from five to 19 years.

It was a dramatic conclusion to the largest trial conducted by the tribunal, set up in 1993 to prosecute the worst war-crimes offenders even while fighting was still under way among ethnic groups in the disintegrating Yugoslavia.

The slaughter of the Muslim men and boys around Srebrenica was the worst massacre on European soil since World War II. Thursday's verdict could indirectly affect another trial, that of former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, which began last year following his capture in Belgrade in 2008. Karadzic, a key figure throughout the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, also is accused of genocide for the Srebrenica slaughter.

Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara, convicted of the worst crime in the war-crimes statute, were high-ranking security officers with the Bosnian Serb army that overran Muslim forces and thinly armed U.N. troops in the Srebrenica enclave. Drago Nikolic, convicted of aiding and abetting genocide, was a brigade security commander.